COMP 421 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Sadomasochism, Ontological Argument, Black Body
27 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Branch of critical race theory - afropessimism
Black becomes a figuration of the opposite of what it means to be human
Ontological argument about the nature of blackness
You need to end the world because the world is predicated on anti-blackness
Hartman
● (82) slaves only had subjectivity in the context of punishment
○ Relationship of criminality to blackness is a foundational and structural issue -
police brutality today
● Why is the black positioned as criminal?
● Displacement of white violence
● In order for the other groups like immigrants to be accepted into society there always has
to be an other - the black
● (92) wedding of pleasure and pain - idea of seduction
● Discourse of seduction (87)
○ They are participants in their own subjection
○ Deny the position of victim hood
● What are the possibilities in this context?
○ Free will becomes impossible for the slave
○ In order to become the self is to give the self up (104)
○ We tend to find agency only in acts of resistance but this complicated this
dynamic
○ Reading agency in an act that can be read as complicity
Sharpe
● Biard painting - displaces the blame from the English to the French
● (118) Sadomasochism of everyday black life - being in the position of working in the
institution that deals with blackness
● By overlaying their relationship to the museum to the s/m relationship we see the
masochistic relationship to the institution
● Finding pleasure in these constraints
● Pleasure is also taken from upholding this institution that oppresses them
● Institutions do survive because they are able to draw those they oppress into these
sadomasochistic relationships
● Playing the slave “a little bit”
○ Are they duped or is this actually the only way in which they can draw pleasure
from the institution?
● “Remember me but forget my fate”
○ In the context of the afterlife of slavery - not letting slavery go, recalling it but it
doesn’t turn it into destiny
○ In eroticizing it the black subject is able to change what the relationship is to him -
he can get something out of it
● What happens to the conservator?
Document Summary
Black becomes a figuration of the opposite of what it means to be human. You need to end the world because the world is predicated on anti-blackness. (82) slaves only had subjectivity in the context of punishment. Relationship of criminality to blackness is a foundational and structural issue - police brutality today. In order for the other groups like immigrants to be accepted into society there always has to be an other - the black. (92) wedding of pleasure and pain - idea of seduction. They are participants in their own subjection. Free will becomes impossible for the slave. In order to become the self is to give the self up (104) We tend to find agency only in acts of resistance but this complicated this dynamic. Reading agency in an act that can be read as complicity. Biard painting - displaces the blame from the english to the french.
